Where Everything New Is Old Again: Southern Gospel Singing Schools

Abstract

Where Everything New Is Old AgainSouthern Gospel Singing Schools Brooks Blevins (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On occasion, during those informal singings, Orgel Mason, the founder and director of the Brockwell Gospel Music School, would take the floor to promote the school, tout the beauty of shape notes, and lead the house in a gospel standard or two. Mason organized the first Brockwell Music School in the summer of 1947. Photo courtesy of Beverly Meinzer/Brockwell Gospel Music School, 2016. [End Page 135] He looks like he should be in pads and a helmet, protecting a quarterback on some manicured Southeastern Conference field. But his massive hands and fingers frolic along the keyboard with the dexterity and unpredictability of mice in a late winter hayloft. He sits grinning through a goatee at the main piano, romping away at a tune he had never seen before yesterday, a new melody branded with the echoes of jangling strokes on pine walls and sunburned voices in two-door meeting houses. Twenty feet away, perched formally atop the second piano’s bench like a downy owl peeking from his nest, a wisp of a boy accompanies his massive partner. The lad’s eyes burn a hole in the songbook. His petite hands move effortlessly across the keys—a waterbug on a summer eddy. No wasted movements, no change of expression on his face. Two masterful musicians, bound to be ignored. The voices in this auditorium are what matter most. That becomes clear when the singing starts. The silver-haired song leader peers over tiny spectacles, chops the air with her right arm, swings it to her left, to the right and back up to its starting point, and we are off. Six-year-old sopranos, eighty-year-old tenors, teenage wannabe basses hold their paperback songbooks as instructed—out from the body in one hand (the other is for “leading”)—and follow their respective parts. The tenors lead: mi, mi, do, mi. Half a beat into the second measure, everyone else joins in, each section following its own line. Shape notes the first time through, followed by three verses of a newly minted song called “A Godly Man.” It will likely never appear in another songbook; once the new books arrive for next year’s school, it may never be heard or sung again. But on this day, “A Godly Man” reverberates throughout the cinderblock auditorium, one hundred voices in four-part harmony—or something approximating it. This is, after all, only the second day of singing school.1 People have been doing this on North American soil for the better part of 300 years—and with shape notes for 200. The gospel singing school melds two American musical traditions—the singing school and shape notes. Designed to improve congregational singing by imparting the rudiments of musical education, singing schools date to early-eighteenth-century New England. Near the end of that century, William Little and William Smith published The Easy Instructor, which introduced the concept of replacing standard round notes with shapes that correspond with tones or pitches on the musical scale. Though denounced as “dunce notes” by traditionalists, Little and Smith’s four-note system gained widespread popularity among the untutored Christian masses, especially those stimulated by the revivalist fires of the Second Great Awakening. This four-note system, in which three of the shapes were re-used to complete the seven tones on the diatonic scale, reigned nearly half a century until the publication of Jesse Aikin’s The Christian Minstrel, which added three additional distinctive shapes and thereby created the seven-note system. Aggressively marketed by southern songbook publishers like Aldine S. Kieffer and A. J. Showalter, the seven-note system was adopted as the [End Page 136] common language of a pliable and adaptive sacred style that gradually emerged as “gospel” in the late 1800s.2 Click for larger view View full resolution In the summer of 2011, my daughter and I attended one of the oldest of the gospel singing schools. Only a seven-mile drive from the family farm in Arkansas, the Brockwell Gospel Music School has instructed generations of children (and adults...